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Monday, June 18, 2012

Let's Table That

Sometimes, when two people love each other very much, they take that love and turn it into a coffee table.

It all started on Saturday as I was drooling over this table I saw over at The Blissful Bee:

Which was inspired by this one from Restoration Hardware. It retails for $1045, which is more than my life is worth.

It made me sad when I saw it because I wanted it so badly, but I knew it could never work out between us. I see so many projects online made out of wood pallets and I think they look awesome, but I am also super grossed out by the thought of all the chemicals/feces/bugs that come along with using pallets. Not only that, but for some crazy reason Gary has a moral objection to building something out of crappy, rotting wood.

So you can imagine my elation when I continued reading and found that this project was NOT made of old wood, but new wood that was just made to LOOK old! (Click here for the super awesome tutorial from The Blissful Bee.)

I made a deal with Gary that I would cancel our super fancy dinner reservations if he would build me a table like that, and it worked! We bought some different sized pine planks, pulled out some hammers, screwdrivers and one super sharp thing that Gary didn't really want me to use and just went to town. It was so liberating. There's nothing like intentionally destroying something beautiful to really make you feel like a woman.

Then we used two different colors of stain, let it dry and went over it lightly with an electric sander. Gary was so funny to watch while we were working on it because his inner perfectionist had a big problem with what we were doing. The whole time we were applying the stain (sloppily, using some of his ripped up old t-shirts) Gary just kept mumbling under his breath, "This is so wrong. Everything about this is wrong."

Here are some pictures! Please excuse the blurry dog in the background. And the random piece of wood next to the fireplace. And the tufts of fur all over the floor. Basically just...try not to look at anything besides the table.

The rest are close-ups of the damage we inflicted.

I am so, so, sososo happy with how it turned out, but Bravo doesn't seem to be quite as impressed with it as I am. He's such a hipster.